Senior advisor to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has called for one-on-one nuclear negotiations with the Sextet of world powers, Press TV reported on Dec. 27.
"If we don't have interactions with each of these six countries and don't hold one-on-one talks with them, we have not used a right method. We should negotiate with different countries separately," Velayati said in a Friday TV interview.
He pointed to Iran's previous bilateral talks with the United States on Iraq and Afghanistan and noted that Tehran and Washington can also hold direct talks about the Islamic Republic's nuclear energy program.
On September 27, Iran President Hassan Rouhani and his US counterpart, Barack Obama, held a telephone conversation. The call was the first direct communication between the Iranian and US presidents since Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1979.
Iran and the six world powers are scheduled to resume a new round of expert-level talks in the Swiss city of Geneva on Monday.
Iran and the six countries also sealed a historic interim agreement in Geneva on November 24 in an effort to set the stage for the full resolution of the West's decade-old dispute with the Islamic Republic over the country's nuclear energy program.
Under the deal, the six countries have undertaken to lift some of the existing sanctions against the Islamic Republic in exchange for Tehran agreeing to limit certain aspects of its nuclear activities during a six-month period. It was also agreed that no more sanctions would be imposed on Iran within the same time frame.